iPhone 5 Trade In Program: How to Get the Most for Your Old iPhone

Apple unveiled the long-awaited iPhone 5 yesterday and many iPhone owners are already looking to see where they can get the most value for their older models so that they can pre-order and purchase the new one.

Various online gadget resellers are reporting that the trade-in rates have shot up significantly over the past few days. But these amounts customers are receiving for handsets such as the iPhone 4S could drop significantly as the iPhone 5's Sept. 21 release date approaches.

Gazelle, a site that normally takes trade-ins for smartphones, reported a 600 percent increase of the last 30 days when compared to the 30 days before the release of the iPhone 4S. The growth in trade-ins shows "just how excited consumers are about the iPhone 5," according to the site's chief gadget officer Anthony Scarsella.

The site compensates customers with checks, Paypal, or an Amazon gift cards and the Amazon option grants them with 5 percent more on the value on the device.

Any iPhone 4 8GB in good condition will give customers $140, and an iPhone 4S 64GB in good condition will get them up to $350. The values on the iPhone 4 and 4S have dropped by almost $60 since last month and that will only happen more and more once the new model is released.

Gazelle's CEO is urging iPhone owners to trade in their old devices as soon as they can.

Trade-ins can also be performed with other retailers such as Amazon, eBay, NextWorth, GameStop, Best Buy, RadioShack, Apple, PowerMax, Craigslist, and Verizon Wireless.

Another retailer known as Glyde created a resale value chart for all iPhone models.

On this chart the iPhone 3GS 8GB is worth around $114, the 32GB $135, the iPhone 4 8GB $215, iPhone 4 16GB $243, the iPhone 4S 16GB $343, and the iPhone 4S 64GB is worth around $404.